Propaganda is most effective when it's least expected. Citizens of the USSR knew the government was lying to them regularly, and developed a healthy skepticism of its statements. I think many Americans believe their free-speech society is propaganda-free, and as such, have a poor "immune response." Maybe a pervasive fake news problem will hone the citizens' bullshit detectors. Here's hoping.

This is what you do when you can't make a better product for your user base; you make a better product for those who prey upon you user base, bill the predators, and if not enough victims show up, you up the incentive.

This is basically what I do, but with a theme: my phrase is always a line that I would have delivered in a movie, had I been a character in that movie. I can leave myself hints like "Heat" or "12 Monkeys" and because the line doesn't appear in the movie, even feeding the whole damn screenplay into a brute-force program won't work.

At this point, anything broadly considered to be a "major US news outlet" has, at best, a tangential relationship with "news." CNN is hopelessly clueless and out of touch, while Fox & MSNBC are the propaganda arms of their respective parties. The NYT sat on a vitally important story, clearly in the public interest, in order to help GWB's re-election campaign. These groups are marketing organizations, who sometimes publish news as a means of promoting their brand.

On the plus side, a major US journalism outlet, The Intercept, is on it.

Origin was never about serving the customer better, it was always about EA making more money per sale and having more control. Ditto for the MS app store. Probably, ditto for FB/Unity. There's no way that anyone looks at the gaming market and says, "wow, Steam is failing to meet its customers' needs, so I'll get right on that and create something better!" They're looking at the gaming market and saying, "wow, I wish all that money was going into my pockets." There's nothing wrong with making a profit, but it's supposed to be the reward for providing value to your customers, not corralling people into your locked-down walled garden.

I've boycotted Origin (and, therefore, all EA games) since its inception five years ago. I've been periodically tempted by Battlefield games, but mostly, I just don't feel like I've missed out on anything. I will feel the same way about whatever FB/Unity come up with.

Except that we're running out of helium, can't make more, and we need it for things like MRI machines. Considering that we already use highly combustable jet fuel in aircraft, I'm not sure the risk to passengers of using hydrogen outweighs the risk to modern medicine by running out of helium.

Well, a heat-seeking missile won't lock, but radar-guided would, and laser-guided or wire-guided missiles don't need to lock. Also, a lot of air-to-air warheads are wrapped in a kind of chain-link fence structure that would rip long gashes in the blimp's skin at detonation.